Comment

Alan and Steve, your reasoning is circular. You believe we should deny all supernatural claims because science cannot detect or study them, but science cannot study them because they are super-natural- apart from the natural world. Science is only equipped to study the natural world of matter and energy You believe there is no evidence for anything supernatural, but the only evidence you will except is based on the scientific method, which again is illequipped to study anything outside of matter and energy, the natural world. If you want to infer that nothing exists outside of the natural world, that is your perogative, but their are no observations, measurement or series of experiments to back up your claim so it is not based on science. Your claim is based on philosophy.

Let me use this analogy. A man scours the beach with a metal detector and brings back soda can caps, coins and jewlery. He claims he has found everything beneath the sand, but you tell him there must be other items not made of metal under the sand. If we are going to find other materials in the sand (or provide evidence that nothing else exists there) we need to use other tools aside from the metal detector.

I'm surprised I need to explain the difference between how something works and why it works. Let me use the baking a cake example that was mentioned. The recipe and its application is how a cake is baked. Science is great at studying such things (identifying and measuring ingredients, experimenting with different temperatures or proportionss, ect). Why the cake was baked is in the mind of the baker. What is the purpose of the cake? A birthday? To hide a file for a prison break? To satisfy a chochalate fetish? Science cannot study the mind of the baker. The baker must tell us why she/he baked the cake.

Physicists have successfully used science to explore the physical properties of our universe and have determined that the odds are astronomical against the universe being designed for living things. Physics explains how the universe works, but it cannot discover why it was put together the way it was. To say it was God who created it or random chance or that there is a mulitverse of universes out there are all suppositions based on theology or philosophy. They are not based on science in any way. Science cannot tell us why the universe is here, why it works they way it does or why we are here.

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The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.